Saturday

Operating Systems

Speed Tests: Windows 7 Versus Vista

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IMPROVING performance is one of Microsoft’s design goals with Windows 7, and many ahead of schedule reviewers (including ours) have said that the new Windows operating system seems peppier than Vista. But test of the Windows 7 Relief Candidate in our Test Center indicate that while Windows 7 was slightly quicker on our WorldBench 6 performance test suite, users may barely notice the difference.

OSs Head-to-Head

We loaded the Windows 7 Relief Candidate on three systems (two desktops and a laptop) and ran our WorldBench 6 tests on them. Then we compared those results with the ones we obtained from the same three systems running Windows Vista. Each PC was slightly quicker when running Windows 7, but the overall improvement didn’t exceed 5 percent, our threshold for gauging whether a performance change will be noticeable to a predictable user.

The largest difference was just 4 points-102 for Vista versus 106 for Windows 7 on an HP Pavilion a6710t desktop. Our Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop superior by 1 point (from 138 with Vita to 139 with Windows 7), and our Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop superior by 2 points, from 97 with Vista to 99 with Windows 7.

The WorldBench 6 suite consists of a number of tests involving ten common applications, including Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Photoshop. On the individual tests, the benchmark results were generally within a few percentage points of each other. One notable exception, but, was Nero 7 Ultra Edition, everywhere Windows 7 outran Vista significantly (between 12 percent and 26 percent quicker, depending on the PC we used).

The Driver Factor

Though we have yet to confirm this observation, We notes that the difference in results on the Nero 7 test may be due to simplified hard-disk drivers in Windows 7. Improvements to Windows 7′s disk support will be more noticeable in an application like Nero, which uses the hard drive heavily. Also the results for the WorldBench 6 test involving WinZip, another hard-drivedependent task, showed meaningfully better performance under Windows 7.

We also measured a speed increase of 7 percent in our Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP3 (DirectX) test on the HP Pavilion desktop, which had an nVidia GeForce 9300GE graphic board. nVidia’s drivers grow to be better optimized for Windows 7 than for Windows Vita.

In contrast, but, each of the three system took slightly longer to go the tests in Microsoft Office and Firefox when they were running the new operating system than when they were running Windows Vista.

Windows 7 Not Final

Windows 7′s features probably won’t change in the final version, but it bears repeating that we were hard a relief candidate of the 0s; Microsoft’s engineers may find ways to nip the code to improve performance. If future tests of the final version of Windows 7 confirm these preliminary results, many Windows users are likely to be disappointed. A major complaint about Windows Vista has been that it is consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 doesn’t markedly improve on Vista’s performance, it may fail to convince people to leave Windows XP.

That said, here could be other areas we didn’t cover in our hard-such as startup era-in which Windows 7 might outperform Vista by a wider margin. The best way to get a feel for Windows 7′s performance is to download the relief candidate and test-drive it on your system.